FOREIGN POLICY 189

The queen had made up her mind before this, and had taken action, to
support the Dutch. In 1577 she agreed to lend £100,000 to them. Fighting
under commissions from their leader, William L, Sovereign Prince of Orange,
the Dutch had a sort of status a little better than that of mere rebels. There
was a design to make the Duke of Alengon, youngest son of Catherine de Medici,
sovereign of the Netherlands. Alengon, as early as 1572, when he was eighteen
and Elizabeth thirty-nine, had been proposed as husband of the queen, and
this amazing project was still afoot in 1577 ; indeed, it went on until Alen£pn's
death in 1584 after he had unsuccessfully led an " unofficial " French expedition
into the Netherlands.

Elizabeth's money given to the Netherlands (amounting in the end to the
substantial total of some £818,000) helped to keep the Netherlands revolt alive,
but no more. By May 1579 the Spanish governor, the Duke of Parma,
Philip II.'s best general and diplomatist, had regained all the " Belgic " Nether-
lands ; the rest, the Seven Northern Provinces, formed the Union of Utrecht,
constituting the " United Netherlands." A desperate and long-drawn-out
rebellion in Ireland was draining away much of Elizabeth's resources. In 1580
Philip II. conquered Portugal, and thus did not only unite the whole peninsula
under his crown (with a grand naval base at Lisbon), but added Brazil to his
empire. In this year Alengon (called Anjou since his brother the Duke of Anjou
became Henry III. in 1574) was recognised by the insurgent Dutch as sovereign
of the United Netherlands. He came to England, and was received by Elizabeth
in Richmond Palace. She kissed him, and exchanged rings in the presence
of the French ambassador to whom she said: " You may write this to the
king, that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband/' It was after this that
he led his ill-starred expedition into the Netherlands. He was ugly, marked
with the small-pox, and in character not lovable. In the same year as he died,
1584, William of Orange (the Silent) the heroic, constant, self-sacrificing leader .
of the Dutch, was assassinated at Delft by a man for the sake of the price which
Philip II. had set on William's head. The Dutch were now at the end of their
resources. They offered the sovereignty of the Netherlands to Elizabeth,
but she declined, not very definitely, as her way was. It was not until this
year, 1584, that diplomatic relations between England and Spain were severed ;
after the discovery of the Throckmorton Plot (1583), the Spanish ambassador
was ordered by Elizabeth to leave the country (January 1584). At last Elizabeth
made a treaty with the Dutch (loth August 1585), undertaking to send an army
to the Netherlands, and to receive the towns of Flushing, Brill, and Rammekens
as security for her expenses. There followed the fine expedition led by the Earl
of Leicester, 6000 foot, 1000 horse, badly managed by the earl, miserable and
inglorious, though still remembered for the heroic death, on I7th October 1586,
of Philip Sidney, after a wound received at the battle of Zutphen.